Day 1 – Today me and my partner Demitri started to modify our NXT for the golf ball challenge. We used inspiration from construction machines to create our robot. We added another motor on top of the NXT that had two scoopers that would pick up the golf ball from the tee and hold it. We started laying it out and putting some pieces together.
Day 2 – Today we finished building our robot for the challenge. We had trouble adjusting the power settings to create the perfect motions for the robot but we solved that problem and had it up and running. After some trial and error we had a robot that picked up the golf ball and brought it to the finish point but we couldn’t get the robot to drop the ball into the hole.
Day 3 – Today we had one task and that was to figure out how our robot can get the golf ball in the finish point. We had everything else down but we just couldn’t finish the challenge’s last step. Everytime the golf ball was just stuck on the brick and was not able to fall into the hole. We then came to the conclusion that the ball needed momentum to be pushed into the hole. So we had our robot stop earlier and let it go so it wasn’t dropped while the robot was stationary. It worked and we had the finish time of 13.33 seconds and we were the 3rd group to complete the challenge in our class.
Day 4 – Today was our last day of testing, me and Demitri attempted to make our robot shorter so it could go under the obstacle. We figured that if we could accomplish that it would knock off at least 5 seconds from our original 13.33 second time. We weren’t able to alter our robot so it could support 3 engines without most of the base we had established. We ran out of time so we weren’t able to test more options.
Sean Nicgorski 